Responsibility is an integral part of our business – an update on Intel’s CSR activities in Europe
By Dr. Thomas Osburg, Director Europe – Corporate Affairs Group for Intel
As welaunch our 2011 European CSR report, I wanted to share a short update on our progress compared to last year and an overview of where we plan to go from here. So let’s start with some progress reports:
Update on Progress
We’ve expanded our education programmes
In the Education space, we wanted to help teachers integrate leading-edge technologies into teaching and learning, make the Intel® Teach programme more customisable and launch it in up to five new European countries. As I mentioned six months ago, the Intel Teach programme has reached more than 1.3 million European teachers and over ten million globally in the past decade. The number of teachers that have benefitted from the programme continues to grow and we’re also on track to expand the programme to new European markets. As a key vehicle for this, we have launched the “Intel Transforming Learning” Series, which includes both 20 hours face-to-face training and flash-based eLearning. Both offerings are targeted at K-12 teachers in 1:1 learning environments, which is growing in importance for the region. In addition, we focused our support on three key high-level Education Conferences and attracted several hundred educators from all across Europe; the 8thIntel Education Summit in Spain focused education and economic development; our curriculum Roundtable in Oxford dealt with all issues around education policy; and the standards and education transformation sessions at this year’s Education World Forum in London focused on the holistic view in how to transform schools in the 21st century.
We’ve increased our support for entrepreneurship
Our second goal, expanding support for entrepreneurship, was fully attained. For our flagship competition, the Intel Business Challenge Europe, we are proud to announce that through the network of 20 affiliated competitions in Europe and our ten professional affiliated organisations, the Challenge has reached over 40,000 students this year. More than 100 projects from 20 countries have made it through to the second round of Europe’s biggest business plan competition and are set to compete at the finals in Sopot, Poland, in September.
We have also been working with Junior Achievement – Young Enterprise (JA-YE) and Ferd to establish the pan-European Social Enterprise Program, which will guide more than 7,000 students aged 15 - 19 in taking a social business idea from concept to reality over the course of two academic years. Designed in response to feedback from educators, the European Commission and businesses, the programme helps students form their own social enterprise and discover first-hand how such a company functions and how they could develop a business based on this new model. Finally, we kicked off the Social Innovation Summer School in collaboration with the European Business School (EBS).
While we are also working to bring entrepreneurship curriculum to K-12 schools in partnership with the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and the University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, we have found that we might need a more holistic concept in order to really achieve impact. This will be one of the focus areas for next year. Cultivating an entrepreneurial spirit amongst young people has become a strong focus for us over the past year because we know that job creation is vital to future growth and prosperity. With youth unemployment at unprecedented levels in some European countries, we recognise that we need to give young people the tools and encouragement to generate their own jobs and increase their employability.
We maintained our focus on inspiring students for math and science
I also said we would maintain our focus on math and science education as the key foundation to the innovation capacity of economies. At the world’s largest pre-college science fair, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, we had 19 European countries participate in the global finals in Pittsburgh, US, in May, marking an increase of three countries over last year and establishing a new record for the region. In addition, we also introduced the concept of preparatory workshops in countries like Germany where participating student teams were coached by professionals how to best present their great ideas and inventions to maximise the chances of winning. We are also happy to report the expansion of Intel Sci-preneurship programme into the K-12 level. Intel and JA-YE Europe organised STEM innovation camps in seven European countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Turkey) reaching more than 1,000 students. With the help of Intel volunteers we selected the best teams to qualify for European Innovation Camp 2012, which took place in Brussels in May this year.
We’ve increased the number of Intel colleagues who volunteer their time and skills
We have achieved a participation rate of more than 45% of EMEA Intel employees volunteering and have worked to link their time contribution to their skills and real problem solving. As an example, our highly qualified female technical workforce is helping to increase the interest in STEM among girls and female students through schemes like “Deployons nos elles” in France. We feel that our workforce can contribute a great deal to helping engage girls in STEM-based careers and entrepreneurship because we have many talented female employees across our business that would be excellent role models.
We’ve maintained our focus on transparent CSR reporting
And finally, we wanted to make our CSR reporting more accessible and transparent. Building on our regional and local language CSR reporting, this year’s report is also available as an online microsite so that our stakeholders and the world at large can review our results. It’s an exciting evolution of our report and I’d welcome your feedback. In addition to regular reporting, we’re also looking globally at how we can offer real-time reporting in areas like manufacturing and our impact on the environment so that we can offer true transparency. For example, we launched http://exploreintel.com this year to offer real-time transparency on emissions in fabs like those in New Mexico and China.
Directions for the coming months and year
So, where do we go from here? In addition to continuing to work on the above mentioned topics, there are two key strategic directions I want to mention:
First, our focus will increasingly shift to creating social innovations. Here, we will work with external stakeholders like NGOs to identify burning social needs and create technology innovations that help to overcome them. To us, social innovation is the combination of approaches that make a positive impact on society that could not be achieved by one partner alone. The launch of the Classmate PC some years ago is a great example, as is our more recent “Iniciativa Madrid” programme in Spain, where unemployed people received training with Notebooks to help them restart in the job market.
Second, we will work with all Intel Business units to increase the levels of sustainability in everything we do. As a leader in technology worldwide, Intel is in a unique position to play a significant role creating a more sustainable future in close collaboration with stakeholders. We will foster and support this effort by enabling activities across functional departments and connecting external and internal stakeholders to achieve new levels of synergies and sustainability for the whole firm.
I hope that the above blog update is of interest and helps demonstrate our commitment to CSR activities and transparency… I’ve tried to show what’s working, what needs more refinement and how we’re trying to connect our programmes together. With that in mind, I’d welcome any feedback or ideas on how we can improve further!